As information technology and globalization expand the horizons of economic agents’ production possibilities and decisions, interconnections between productive entities are likely not only expanding but having increasing impacts on production and productivity. Such spillovers may derive from various types of linkages, including those associated with time, space, and industry or sector. Producti...

Productivity differences can explain differences in economic growth across countries. It has been demonstrated that the presence of a foreign-owned multinational enterprise (MNE) in a developing country is one of the most important methods through which technology transfer occurs. This presence could be in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), licensing, or imports from the developing co...

Few topics in international economics have been examined as extensively as technology transfer from foreign affiliates to domestic firms, and the amount of empirical research in this area is still growing at an exponential rate, with more than a score of studies published in the last two years alone. The topic is so attractive because the assumed externality associated with the transfer,”techno...

Investigating spillovers (potential costs and benefits to a firm that extend beyond an individual transaction), I integrate transaction cost theory and the knowledge-based view of the firm in an effort to better understand the efficient governance of knowledge. Contracts with detailed task descriptions were associated with transactions with the potential to generate new and reusable knowledge. ...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the years of 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to significant productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is economically important, accounting for about 14% of productivity growth in U.S. firms bet...

This paper examines the determinants of R&D cooperation focusing on the relationship between firms R&D cooperation and knowledge spillovers on a sample of Italian innovative firms drawn from the Italian Fourth Community Innovation Survey. I explore this relationships taking into account different types of R&D cooperations and the endogeneity problems which arise from the likely mutual dependenc...

Governments often promote inward foreign investment to encourage technology “spillovers” from foreign to domestic firms. Using panel data on Venezuelan plants, we find that foreign equity participation is positively correlated with plant productivity (the “own-plant” effect), but this relationship is only robust for small enterprises. We then test for spillovers from joint ventures to plants wi...